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You seem excited about your business ready to be explored by the world. Your visit to this post implies that you have been doing great with your digital marketing efforts and wish to take them a level up. It’s time that you know how are you going to make this happen. Before getting straight with the tips and tricks, it’s crucial that you understand the real power of the marketing arsenal you are going to use throughout your journey. In various definitions of content marketing, you have read till now, the part which makes sense is, the value you provide to your audience in the form of content by sharing the right information that helps them to solve their problems.

Content marketing concentrates on the idea of improving the quality of your services by providing your audience precisely what they need. You should, to take your business to greater heights, adopt this idea.

But, why is it essential to incorporate this technique into the world of marketing. Why do you need to create a content strategy to grow your business? What role does it play?

You must be seeking for answers to all these questions. And, it is highly likely that while you understand the importance of the right content, you would get the right path to exhibit the real value in your content.

What makes Content Marketing important?

Broadly, three major categories benefit from content marketing today:

Consumers

Today’s consumers strive for useful information. Before they make a purchase or start using a service, they look for sources that support their decision. Therefore, authentic and relevant content helps them to make the right choices.

Search Engines

Search engines help consumers to find the information they need. The search engine algorithms, like that of Google’s, keep changing to improve the way how web crawlers satisfy user queries. Quality content, updated, and new facts and figures help web crawlers substantially to reach your business.

Business

Relevant, valuable, and consistent content helps you to maintain healthy relationships with your customers. It makes people aware of their knowledge and expertise, thereby revealing their matter of interest. It allows you to drive significant traffic to your website and let people know more about you and your services.

When there is a pool of opportunities for both you and your audience, then why don’t just grab them and put in the right practices to make it work.

No matter, you are a newbie or an expert in terms of experience in content marketing, you can still leverage the best out of it. You must follow the right tips that suit your current position in the market.

Kickstart Your Content Marketing Strategy with These Tips

1. Understand your audience better

Well, if you have made up your mind entirely to start with a robust content strategy, then you should start with determining your audience who would get access to your content.

You have to answer questions like:

• From whom are you creating content?
• Who would be leveraging the tons of information you are planning?
• Who will react to the content you provide?
• Who would be your customers?

Determining your target audience before involving them in your strategy is very crucial. It helps you to deliver your content to the right people without bothering other uninterested sections of society.

Also, if you understand your audience, you can provide them with the right solutions to their problem.

Research about the preferences of your audience. Know their likes and interests. Pick out the topics they love to read about.

Track the activities of your followers on social media to know what they would like to see, and what they are already looking for.

Focus on two things while considering your audience for content marketing:

• What are their requirements?
• What are their preferences?

The first one allows you to create unique content that is not available anywhere else at the point, and the second one helps you to lead through the content they are already engaged with.

2. Choose the right content types

Now, when you have your audience segmented and filtered, it will be easy for you to create the right type of content for them. The right content signifies the format with which your audience is comfortable.

Choose the platforms where you do not find it difficult to reach your prospects. Also, do not restrict yourself to just one content format. It would help if you adopt diversity in producing your content, at the same time, looking forward to maintaining your own comfort level as a beginner in content marketing.

You can choose to go with these content types:

Blog posts

Blog posts prove to be a great source of information for your audience. They get answers to their questions with the help of blog posts.

Your blog posts can be an all-in-one collection of tutorials, how-to guides, industry news articles, latest trends, advice from experts, interviews, case studies, etc.

Webinars

Webinars offer you an opportunity to interact with your audience more accurately and effectively. You get to know about your audience personally while delivering the session. Also, they develop a sense of trust in your services.

Podcasts

These are audio content that your audience would love to hear in their free time or doing some work. Podcasts are an excellent platform for you to share your knowledge with the audience that is eager to discover something new every day.

YouTube Videos

Videos are a great source of entertainment for people. Content marketing is just incomplete without the video being used as content. YouTube is the most preferred channel of an audience of any kind. If you share your content in the form of YouTube clips, it is highly likely to be noticed and acknowledged by the audience.

Slideshare Slides

If you want to tell creative stories in a few words, Slideshare slides are the best option for you. They allow you to incorporate visuals, text, graphs, etc. simultaneously in content to convey your words.

3. Promote your content on the right channels

Content marketing makes sense if your content is able to reach the right people at the right time. It is essential to make the information available to your audience whenever it asks for it. Whatever you produce, you must put it on the right channel to communicate with your audience.

Fortunately, there are many proven ways to promote your content. Implement these promotional marketing channels in your content marketing strategy to earn the benefits you wished for.

Social Media 

Almost every potential buyer uses social media for entertainment. It will help if you create a social media plan for content marketing to share your content directly with the audience you target for your marketing campaigns.

Also, people love to share effective content with their connections if they like it. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. help you to reach a wider audience and boost your brand awareness.

The number of likes, shares, and comments measure the success rate of the resources you provide to your audience.

Email Marketing

People are still attached to the age-old practice of reading emails as soon as they are delivered in their inbox. These emails could be an invitation to subscribe to a service, get a gift card or coupon, a free eBook or whitepaper to educate them, or updates about what’s going on in the industry of their interest.

This is what the right content marketing relies upon. You provide people with what bothers them the most. Try to create seasonal promotions or promotions around a specific event. Also, avoid overstuffing promotions in emails to keep it precise and to the point.

Email marketing is beneficial when you introduce your business to another, i.e., B2B marketing. Where professionals do not have much time to swipe through the other channels, they are most active in responding to emails.

Paid Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, as you know it, allows you to target a highly specific audience for your content marketing campaigns.

You select a segment of the audience, curate ads for them, and pay for every click that your ad gets. PPC advertising works when you understand your audience’s interests thoroughly and know where they are present. It can be achieved by tracking the online activity of your prospects, what they do, what are the things that attract them, what do they follow, etc.

4. Start a blog

The best and creative content marketing idea you can ever get an advantage of is starting a Blog. It works as an essential point of attraction for your audience. Every prospect visits a company’s blog to know more about their services and find out how they are useful for them. When creating content for your blog, make sure you use storytelling to maximize your customer engagement.

To get started with a content marketing blog:

1. Start with choosing a topic for your first blog post. Look for relevant titles that can catch your audience’s attention. Find out trending topics that your people are following. Get 20 blog post ideas that you can use to engegae with your audience.
2. Work on the look and feel of your blog. Design its interface and functionality according to your requirements. You can either integrate it with your website or give an entirely different interface.
3. Build up a robust blogging team who would:

• • write content for the blog posts,
  • maintain blog schedule,
  • brainstorm ideas for topics,
  • handle comments and reviews on the posts,
  • respond to shares and mentions,
  • manage technical support and guidance, and
  • take care of analytics and blog performance.

4. Maintain a calendar to keep track of your daily activity and schedule your monthly plan. Decide when you will post and what else you will do after you publish your content. Sustain uniformity in your schedule while assigning the date and time for consecutive posts.
5. Get your content created by a team of professional content writers. Explain to them about your services and the tone you need in your content.
6. It’s time that you publish your first blog post. After you go your first post published, you have to make sure it reaches the right people. You have to promote your posts through various possible means like:

• • Use Twitter hashtags
  • Share on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
  • Promote with Pinterest
  • Use images and videos while sharing to make your post interesting
  • You can also try different titles for your post and test them for performance.

7. Optimize your blog for visibility on search engines. Search engines are the only way people can reach you and your blog. Effective content marketing needs best practices.

5. Embed the best SEO practices in your content

Search Engine Optimization is not just crucial for your blog. But, it holds its significance throughout your content marketing strategy. To create quality content and make it reach the expected audience, SEO practices are a must for your business. Keep in mind that SEO is not a one-time effort and it takes time to see SEO results.

Before creating content for your posts, you need to keep in mind the SEO rules and tactics.

• Use headings wisely in your content. Headings tell search engines what exactly your content is about. Use your keywords in headings to improve your search engine rankings. For example, if the keyword is “content marketing company,” your heading could be “The best content marketing company in the USA.
• Your next essential tool for effective SEO is Keyword. Search engines reach your pages with the help of relevant keywords that your audience enters. It is therefore required that you incorporate the right keywords naturally in your content with proper density. Use keywords smartly according to their categories:
  • Short keywords with one word
  • Medium keywords with two-three words
  • Long-tail keywords with more than three words that make a phrase.
• Keyword length depends on the user’s intent, what they think while looking for information. You should optimize your content for every keyword type.
• You can give a glimpse of your content to your audience with meta descriptions. It is 160-170 characters long content, which improves the click-through rates on your post. Your visitors can easily catch the attention of your write-up if you curate an eye-catching meta description.
• A significant element on your content page is Title. It broadly explains the audience about your content and shows up on the top of the page. Make sure that you include your main keyword in the title (topic) of your content.

Link building is another critical factor that improves your content marketing practices. Get inbound links from authenticated sites to prove search engines the validity of your content. Also, if your business operates in a specific geographical region, you should make sure to optimize your site for local SEO.

6. Provide incentives

To make your target audience reach you, you need to make your content marketing efforts decent and leveraging. But how are you going to do that?

Your leads are not going to give you their contact information before they find something useful for them in doing so. You have to offer them that valuable thing. What is that?

Incentives. You can also call it free content. Provide your audience with some incentives in the form of content that helps them in solving their problems. You have to make those pieces of content to be knowledgeable, which educates them in the best possible way.

Incorporate the best offers in your content marketing plan:

eBooks

eBooks can prove to be the best incentive you can provide to your audience. Choose something that interests your audience and is useful to them. You can get their contact information in return for your offer.

Whitepapers

Whitepapers are just like eBooks that allow your audience to know you better. They are similar to how-to guides, which help them to get a solution to their problem.

Webinars and Podcasts

Webinars and Podcasts, as you know from the above section, are also good choices to offer as incentives to your audience. In fact, with webinars and podcasts, you can target and generate qualified leads for your business.

There can be many other options that you can create for your audience. It’s just that you need to experience what your prospects think before opting for a service or purchasing a product.

Incentives are also a great way for you to create more user-generated content. UGC helps you increase social proof and better engage with new users.

Gain an Edge in the Competition with “Experts Tips” for Content Marketing

Over these tips? Need something more exciting and creative for your business? Get some advanced content marketing tips.

1. Go through what you have created till now – Content Audit

If you are genuinely thinking of refreshing your content strategy, then it is a must that you look back and analyze your previous work.

But why?

A content audit helps you to track the effectiveness of your efforts you have made till now and provides a scope of improvement.

It is performed to improve the SEO capability of your content by informing you about which content is doing well, which one needs updates, and which pieces are required to be eliminated from your collection.

It is broadly a three-step process:

• Collect all your content together and organize it in the form of a spreadsheet. Examine what is working and what is declining your position.
• Analyze the content according to its performance. Then work on recommendations; what can you do to recover your loss, upgrade content, edit it, or remove it. Take a good look at your page speed and try to optimize your website for faster performance.
• Create a summary and report all the changes to implement them in your content marketing strategy.

A perfectly executed content audit can also help you to repurpose your content if it is not working for you in its present form. This way, you can give a new direction to content marketing.

2. Enhance your blog performance

You have learned how to start a blog, and maybe it is doing well. But you can let it do just well; you have to boost it up.

For this, you need to think out-of-the-box to leverage the best out of your efforts. Here is how you can do just that.

• Create posts that range from 3,000 – 10,000 words to build audience trust and win search engine rankings. Posts with word count less than 1,000 words may work for beginner level but would not go well with good SEO.
• Summarize your content into a video and share it. The most important highlights for your post incorporated in the video will drive your prospects to read the entire content.
• Boost your content marketing strategy by embedding internal links in your blog post. It will increase navigation on your website and allow your readers to know about other useful posts on your blog. You can link various services pages in your blog post, but make sure to maintain the context.
• Guest blogging is the trending blog tactic that allows you to post on the blogs of other companies and indirectly “invite their customers to your store.”
• Comment on posts of authority sites with links to your website. Ensure that your comments are relevant, and the author of the post responds with backlinks.

3. Optimize your site first

Before you get into other content promotion techniques, you must first look into your site for improvement. You have to go through some elements of your website that contribute to the content you produce. It is a practical content marketing tip that you can leverage.

Have a look at how are you going to do that:

• Does your website have social sharing buttons? You wish your readers to share your content with their fellow mates. But how are they going to do without having an option for it? Place social sharing buttons creatively on your site and notable for your audience. It increases the success rate of promotional content marketing.
• How will you tell your readers to act? CTA (Call To Action) buttons are the only choice you are going to use. If you want people to do something, tell them directly. Include clear, active, and highlighted CTAs for your content.
• Make headlines of your web page attractive. Most of the readers attempt to go through your content after reading the headline itself. If it is not promising, they are no going to step ahead.
• Go for answering questions. Look forward to content that gives solutions to problems of the people. Find out issues that your customers are facing and try to solve them with your content.

4. Work on Social Promotion techniques

The most awaited content marketing promotion is social media marketing. But it also involves incorporating the right practices:

• Maintain uniformity in your posts. Using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. is useful in improving your brand awareness. But you must frequently post on these sites. Make a plan and schedule your posts to avoid irregularity.
• What is the best time to post on social media? It is when your audience is active. It will have a significant impact on your promotion if you post your content when your followers are active on the site. Know the ideal time and participate in the race.
• The type of content you create for social media posts is equally substantial. People look for entertainment on these sites. If you fail to provide that, you will lose. You must incorporate creativity (like quotes, stats, images, etc.) in your content to interest them as well as educate them.
• Hashtags are yet another social promotion arsenal. You get to leverage a growing audience for your post through hashtags. More people from different communities will be connected with you.
• Don’t just copy-paste links of your posts on social platforms. Design artistic images solemnly for sharing along with the post link. Be ideal with content marketing practices.

5. Traditional offline marketing is not off yet – Outreach

To go beyond your digital practices, you can still choose to be traditional in your content marketing efforts. Some tips to do so are mentioned below:

• Ask influencers to share your content. Get email addresses of these people and send a polite request to promote your content. Influencers can prove to be a great deal in the promotion of your services.
• If you have genuine content to share with the public, draft it in the form of Press Release. But make sure you select the publications and websites being particular about your niche.
• There is always a second option, and that is influential journalists and bloggers. You can approach them to share your content. Let them know your content efforts and then see the difference.
• Get yourself quoted in top publications with the help of reporters. Some of the reporters love to invite people for an interview based on their expertise. Look for the service that offers this and go for it.
• You can also get media attention by sponsoring some events like sports, events organized by non-profit organizations, etc. You will get acknowledgment from various people in your industry.

This is how your content marketing efforts will get traction.

6. Content marketing and Custom Content

Custom content is about keeping your existing audience engaged with you and your content. It is aimed at creating new opportunities for you by serving your current customer base. To maintain effective relationships with your audience, you have to take care of them by making them captivated in your content.

Custom content preserves the relevance of keywords with the search results. To make them useful for your audience, you have to make your content eligible to answer their questions.

Custom content lets your audience notice your presence when they need your help. Your eBooks, Whitepapers, and Guides help them to get a solution to their problem.

An essential concept that custom content focuses on is customer loyalty by offering them the value that they need. It is possible only through a tailor-made content marketing approach.

How will you consolidate custom content into content marketing?

• Create customer personas being highly specific about your existing audience. It needs more than just their name and email address. Include every detail that you can get from your customer.
• Shift to customer-centric keywords from generic ones. It will allow you to create audience-specific content. Find phrases that are most likely to be used by your customers.
• Produce content in the format which your customers demand from you or are comfortable with. Look for forms that attract them the most.
• Use more visuals if your audience is not much responsive to written content. Go for high-quality video and audio content.

7. Use analytics to track your progress

Though you are effectively using these content marketing tactics, to know whether it is working or not, you have to keep track of their performance. How do you know if it is really working for your business or something is wrong?

You can take the help of website analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) to solve this problem. Analytics is a way that allows you to monitor, track, watch, and report your content carefully. It is entirely based on numbers that tell you the exact result of your performance and encourages you to make the necessary changes.

Analytics helps you to focus on your conversion rates and improve them if there is an issue. For example, sales and marketing of your product go hand in hand. You cannot use one of them at the cost of the other one. You have to balance them together.

Here is where analytics has a role to play. It tells you precisely where you miss in your practices and provides suggestions for advancement.

Implementing analytics in your efforts would allow you to refine your content marketing strategy. On executing one iteration, measure the results, find out loopholes, and work for betterment. This cycle needs to be repeated for successful marketing.

Analytics will indeed help you to make the right decisions for future changes. In fact, the numbers are more important than theories!

Pay attention

Being a beginner or an expert does not change the way you must practice content marketing. You are now very well aware that the ultimate purpose of creating and marketing quality content is to give the audience what they want, what they look for, and what they need in their life. If you fail to deliver this, no matter how advanced tactics (for namesake) you are using, you are not going to yield anything beneficial for your audience or you, either.

For you to provide value to the audience, it is recommended that you try to grab the best from the tips you have gone through. Execute the best you can to serve your people.